


The Always Ache

by tielan



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Feelings, Gen, Grief, Memorials, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-06
Updated: 2014-01-06
Packaged: 2018-01-07 18:41:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1123091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Most of them aren't his dead. This one is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Always Ache

**Author's Note:**

> Written to the [tumblr](http://tielan.tumblr.com/) prompt by **therealfadedink** : _Raleigh Becket, gen, "if you could just see me now"_.

Mako wanted a backyard because she wanted a puppy.

“But you have _me_ ,” Raleigh protested, grinning until she smacked his bare buttock sharply enough to make him yelp.

“You have no tail.” She smiled, her fingers resting on his tailbone, right at the top of his buttcrack. “I _like_ you without a tail.”

But they have a backyard. No dog yet. They’re waiting until spring.

They have a shrine in the backyard, a little thing of stone and scrap metal beneath the cherry tree. There’s going to be fine gravel paths there when spring comes and they get the delivery in. Raleigh has it all planned.

Right now, though, it’s November, and rainy and damp is the order of the day.

He’s forgone the umbrella – he’ll take a hot shower when he gets back inside. But this... This small pilgrimage he wants to make alone. Mako understands.

Paper flutters in the bare branches of the cherry tree – parchment ribbons on which are written the names of their dead, the ink faded and smeared and the paper tatted from the wind and the weather.

Raleigh goes to his knees on the little dried-grass mat in front of the shrine, in front of the little pot of sand, where a stick of incense is lit every morning, smoky fragrance curling the edges of the fading photos of the dead.

He doesn’t do this often. In fact, he’s only done this one before – most of them aren’t his dead, after all.

This one is.

“Happy Birthday, Yance.”

Five and a half years have given him some distance, some healing. And Mako anchors him, as he anchors her. But he still misses his brother.

A part of him always will.


End file.
